עברית From the forthcoming book: Ahrimanic and Michaelic Immortality: The Apocalypse of the Age of Micheal and the Christ Event of the 21st Century.
The Two Apocalyptic Beasts and the Mystery of the Wound
From the forthcoming book: Ahrimanic and Michaelic Immortality: The Apocalypse of the Age of Michael and the Christ Event of the 21st Century.
2nd lecture, Überlingen, November 4th, 2022.
We want to experience human life with all the heights and depths in this historical time and feel that we are engaged in humanity’s destiny with all our being. We are not afraid to experience this. It is sometimes painful, sometimes difficult, but in other times it is also blessed with light and joy. And in you want to become fully human in the present age, you don’t really want to experience the one without the other. Of course, many people prefer to experience one-sided pain or joy. They will admit only the pain and suffering, and the depressing that comes with it, avoiding the creative joy of life. And others will allow only the joy and pleasures, without the pain, but both will have only half of the human experience today, and not the whole. What is more, this half of life, the one-sided pain and joy will not be the true pain and joy that can only be experienced if they are taken together, but only their ahrimanic and luciferic caricatures. If you try to avoid the difficult and often painful path today, you will also miss the experience of the best forces of the spirit. Because the forces of the spirit are giving us the grace of pain that we can improve ourselves, so that we can develop the forces of healing and the new moral forces that we must have in the future, to fulfil our true earthly goals.
Hölderlin was a person who experienced this mystery very deeply. We could recently visit some of his beloved location on the Neckar in Tübingen and the tower in which he spend the second part of his life. And he wrote this in one of his poems: But where the danger is, the redeeming grow as well. ‘Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch’. He knew this from his experience; if you enter into his biography as whole human beings and go with him through his life you will see exactly how he lived this in every day of his life from childhood until the end of his life, and then all the more strongly after his death.
And this is what we must develop in the present age. With the present age I mean not only the three and a half centuries from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 23rd century, of the present the age of Michael, but the whole 5th cultural epoch in which the consciousness soul develops until the middle of the 4thmillennium. For the entire duration of the 5th epoch, we need this, this deeper soul mood, this holistic-human disposition and Seelenstimmung.
This must be repeatedly said because this is really what is required from us, what we must require from ourselves, if we want to be real humans of this time and not empty shells and masks; not under the time, not above it, but live directly in the middle of what is happening right here and now. How can one in any other way experience the history of the 20th century with its horrors and its salvations, if one does not take the deepest pain and bliss of healing into one’s heart? In this age, also in our daily life, we must learn to experience evil and pain with our human soul as a whole and find the grace and hope, love, and faith giving power, iin the depths of our being. Because the saving power is found if we take into our free etheric heart’s evil and pain, because from there it comes forth. It is the same in the life of the individual and the life of humanity. If I say: I want to meet the Christ, but I don’t want to experience humanity’s and my illness, I don’t want to experience humanity’s pain and make it my pain, I want to meet the Christ just to enjoy his glory and bliss, if you say this, what you are actually saying is: I want to meet Lucifer, not the Christ. And we spoke about it often in our school lectures through the years and referred often to what Rudolf Steiner said that the mystery of evil is only beginning to surface in human evolution in the present age and that from now until the far future, we will have to struggle with it and learn how to transform evil into highest good. Because without experiencing this mystery, we cannot develop the strong moral forces, the healing capacities of the coming Spirit Self, and we will miss the true meaning and destiny of becoming true humans on earth. We will not develop our deep moral forces, the forces of healing love, if we avoid evil, pain, and sickness. But through this experience of pain, we find the source of healing and grace, joy and positive, creative transformation, and we are encouraged to grow on, and become the future healers that we would want to become.
Now, this was not yet required from us in the previous age. In the previous age the mystery of death was the central riddle that the human beings had to grapple with. But the mystery of evil was to a large extent hidden from the non-initiated. And people were actually warned: don’t look back into the abyss of evil. You would be petrified; you would be paralyzed. You could not take it. The power to take it was not yet in our evolution, because the Christ did yet incarnate as man on earth.
You know the biblical story about the wife of Lot, the brother of Abraham. When they escaped Sodom and Gomorrah, she was advised: don’t look back, because what you will see will petrify you. She looked back and became a stone. Also, Orpheus was told: Don’t look back! But he did, and lost Eurydice, his clairvoyant soul forces. This of course had to be so, in that age, the ancient forces of ancient clairvoyance had to die out, and death had to become a mystery. But everything changes in the course of evolution, and today we are actually advised to do the opposite, because the time has come to develop the strong soul forces required to look into the abyss without being paralyzed and the people who merely repeat today what was right in the previous age, ignore the present meaning of the Christ impulse. They deny the meaning of the Christ impulse because the Christ did not only gaze into the abyss of death and evil, but entered into it with his whole cosmic being, transformed the forces of death into the forces of eternal life and the forces of evil into the forces of loving healing.
If you recall, we described the new challenge of evil from different points of view, in the books, The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century, and The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity, because this is the essence of the present Michaelic apocalypse, and of the evolution of the earth until its end and beyond.
If you recall, in my recent lectures in Sweden, that some of you could join through zoom, I read from Rudolf Steiner last testamentary words spoken to the priests of the Christian Community, about the expected rising of the two apocalyptic Beasts in the course of the 20th century, the first Beast in 1933, before the reappearance of the etheric Christ, and the second Beast at the end of the century in 1998. And I want us to contemplate together this profound mystery tonight, because it contains the key to the apocalypse of the age of Michael…